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GameMode 1.3 Released For Optimizing Your Linux Gaming Experience

Feral Interactive has released GameMode 1.3 as the newest feature release to this open-source Linux system daemon to dynamically optimize the CPU/GPU/system state when launching Linux games and to return the system to its normal state when you are done gaming...

Been using most of those features from git for the past week. No noticeable issues with using them, though I don't use their GPU parts. I do all my GPU tuning with WattmanGTK and, trigger warning, load that at boot with systemd. GameMode, Lutris, and Libstrangle make a really killer combination and can do wonders for older GPUs when setup correctly -- VSYNC=1 strangle 30 %command% made my 260x usable with moderately high settings in 2018.

My RX 580 needs undervolting a lot more than it needs overclocking. Simply lowering State's 5-7 by 25mv keeps me from having to hear my GPU's fan while playing games and it runs better since it doesn't run anywhere near as hot, from 75C to 60C under load. With that usage, a one time set at boot works just fine.

About the only use I'd have with the GameMode version would be to tweak the freq table to use stock 6 at state 5, 7 down to 6, and then figure out how high I can push the frequency with down to (up to?) a -10 or -15 undervolt on state 7. Stock voltage just runs too damn hot.

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When I first heard of GameMode, I didn't actually see myself using it, but one day when I saw it was in the Debian Unstable repo I gave it a go anyway and it was super easy to install and set it up, and when that's done you can really just leave it there while it's doing it's thing without getting in your way so I actually ended up using it after all. I like it

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While I appreciate Feral's effort, I still think they should contribute code to the kernel, cpu governor, power management etc. to reach the desired behavior. All of these "game booster" efforts failed on windows 15 years ago, because the OS just became efficient enough in resource management and made them irrelevant. Even as of today, people are laughing at the so-called "game mode" in windows 10. While it's been around for years, not a single benchmark has shown it to do anything useful yet.

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While I appreciate Feral's effort, I still think they should contribute code to the kernel, cpu governor, power management etc. to reach the desired behavior. All of these "game booster" efforts failed on windows 15 years ago, because the OS just became efficient enough in resource management and made them irrelevant. Even as of today, people are laughing at the so-called "game mode" in windows 10. While it's been around for years, not a single benchmark has shown it to do anything useful yet.

The kernel already supports all of this. What the game mode stuff does is turn on those kernel options. They are usually not on by default because they have downsides. Or the kernel cannot know what you want to boost.

How exactly would the kernel know that you want a game to have IO priority, but not your media database? Some hacked together list of "game apps" stored in a "registry" somewhere? Hah.

As for Windows game mode, I've seen reviews where it does help. Usually on lower powered machines like laptops running AMD APU chips. There, the higher priority for game threads helps avoid CPU starvation and blocking. Without game mode, a game thread using tons of CPU can get deprioritized to make room for other threads, like some background update task or AV scan.

On high powered gaming systems it doesn't help because there is plenty of CPU to go around. The bottleneck is almost always the GPU there and game mode can't help. The GPU is almost entirely managed by its driver, not Windows.